Sen. Mike Brubaker is trying to get a marriage amendment onto the Pennsylvania Constitution:
Tom Shaheen, vice president for policy at the Pennsylvania Family Institute, said it’s important to protect marriage in the state’s Constitution — especially considering its proximity to Massachusetts, the only state to allow homosexual “marriage.”
Apparently Tom Shaheen thinks gay marriage is a strange disease we might catch by hanging out near Massachusetts. Are these people for real?
Don’t you remember the films from the 60’s? They’re coming for your children. It has to be stopped. We should force them to wear pink triangles for ease of recognition and to be registered w/ the authorities so they can be located when it comes time for their “re-education”.
I confess, I’ll be a little upset if you catch teh gay marriage, dear. :)
And here I thought federal and state constitutions existed to restrict the government, not us.
I’ve never been able to really make up my mind about how I feel about gay marriage. But I’ll be damned if I’ll sit and watch them pass an amendment to the VA constitution banning it.
Think of this way. Why the hell is the state involved in ANY form of marriage. Why does a straight couple have to give money to the state government for a marriage licence? What is the purpose of a marriage licence?
Money, that’s it.
In my opinion, if people want to marry each other in whatever arrangement made between consenting adults, you should be allowed to to do while giving the state the big middle finger the whole way.
True, if two people of the same sex want to get married by a JP or Captian of a ship or whatever it’s cool, the state nor any resident of the state has any right to tell them no. Just as long as no one tries to force a religous entity to marry them, I have no problem with it.
There is something bad in MA you don’t want to catch, but it’s not prohibiting two adults from making a contract.
I think they call it statist beliefs or socialism.
Or maybe it’s learning to drive like they do in Boston?
Massachusetts the anti-liberty state. Gay is o.k. but guns are bad. Guns threaten are safety but doesn’t AIDS threaten our safety? Why don’t they just ban everything?
Moose, in case you haven’t heard at some point during the last 27 years since we discovered AIDS, it’s not a gay disease. Not sure if you got that message on how it is and is not transmitted. If you didn’t, there’s a whole host of information out there. Check it out sometime.
AIDS and gay rights have absolutely nothing to do with each other, and they have nothing to do with Massachusetts being anti-liberty.
Is the proposal to ban gay marriage, or to prohibit judges from imposing on the state? There is a big difference there. Having judges decide that the state constitution requires same-sex marriage (as happened in Massachusetts) is more of the same kind of judicial activism that got us a Second Amendment that doesn’t mean anything.
“AIDS and gay rights have absolutely nothing to do with each other, and they have nothing to do with Massachusetts being anti-liberty.”
Actually, AIDS and gay rights do have something to do with each other. In 1975, California repealed its laws against oral and anal sex–which had the net effect of legalizing homosexuality. Up to that point, homosexuals had been somewhat in the shadows, and while there were still gay men hooking up and having sex, it was a relatively restrained action.
By the late 1970s, gay men were going to sex clubs in the Bay Area for completely random, anonymous sex. Men would lie face down on couches, and receive anal sex from a dozen or more men in a row, not even ever seeing their faces, much less learning their names. Even pro-gay magazines like _Playboy_ were a little startled by how wild the scene had become, and ran articles about it that suggested that there were behaviors that could even get _Playboy_ a bit stodgy.
The net result was that there was an explosion of STDs such as syphilis, and by 1981, a new and strange disease was showing up in large numbers among gay men–originally called GRID, but later renamed AIDS. It soon spread into the IV drug abusing community through shared sexual partners, and then needles. From there, it infected the blood supply, and caused a small number of deaths among hemophiliacs, transplant patients, and people who had the misfortune to have sex with homosexual/bisexual men, IV drug abusers, and prostitutes.
The speed with which a disease spreads through a society increases with the square of the number of contacts per time until you reach the saturation point. Double the number of sexual partners that people have in a year, and you quadruple the number of people infected. Quadruple the number of sexual partners in a year, and the number infected goes up sixteen times.
One of the reasons why initial projections of how rapidly AIDS would spread were so far off is that researchers did not realize that straights (and lesbians) did not have the enormous number of sexual partners that many gay men were having back then (and some still are).
Also, there are some mechanical reasons why homosexual men are especially effective at spreading the disease. Anal sex, and associated behaviors such as fisting, seem to be especially well-suited to opening up mucus membranes tears through which HIV passes into the bloodstream.
Non-AIDS STD openings (such as chancres) also speed up the process, and gay men then and now are very disproportionately infected with STDs. One gay activist in the early 1990s told me that the San Francisco public health STD clinic was a GREAT place to find new sex partners, since everyone was already infected, there was no need for condoms. (Yes, he wasn’t thinking about the number of different STDs out there.) This is also why there is a much higher rates of infection among straight female prostitutes than among other straight females.
In addition, insertive sex is more effective at infection. That’s why gay men who were receptive to anal sex, and women who were having vaginal sex, were at higher risk of getting infected than the men who were doing the inserting. Because many gay men receiving anal sex then engaged in insertive sex with other men, the disease readily spread through the gay male community. By comparison, women who were infected with AIDS were less likely to spread the disease to other men (although it was possible), simply because they weren’t inserting anything diseased elsewhere. Women also became symptomatic and died much more quickly from AIDS than men did–so they had fewer opportunities to pass on the disease.
There are still some serious questions about whether high rates of drug abuse (such as “poppers” and alcohol), which is much more common about homosexuals than straights, and repeated STD infections, may have played some part in compromising immune systems. There was at one point some plausible evidence that many people who were exposed to HIV once, and had otherwise healthy immune systems, often did not become infected. Repeated exposures, and already compromised immune systems, seem to greatly increase the risks. (And the same was true for female prostitutes, of course, who also have high rates of drug abuse.)
Now, argue if you want that same-sex marriage would reduce the wild promiscuity of gay men. I don’t quite believe that, since some of the poster children for the Mass. law admitted that they had no intention of monogamy. But let’s not pretend that gay rights didn’t play a part in turning AIDS from a disease so obscure that there were only a few samples sitting in pathology labs, not recognized, into one of the major public health problems of the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s.
Sebastian and Snowflakes, you’re giving a knee jerk response to a serious matter. The need for a constitutional amendment is to protect the institution of marriage from judicial activism a la Mass., Vermont, NJ, Iowa, and more to come. Surely a gun rights supporter (remember the 2nd Amendment??) would recognize the need for constitutional amendments. As for the idea of the government somehow getting out of the business of marriage or reducing it to simple contracts, we’d end up like Scandinavia or the Netherlands, where anything goes; most kids grow up in unstable homes; marriage is almost a lost practice; and the culture looks more like the last days of Rome than the “progressive” or “enlightened” labels the libertarians like to claim. Government is involved in marriage because marriage between a man and a woman has private good but also a public good: the next generation.
“Only a marriage between one man and one woman shall be valid or recognized as a marriage in this Commonwealth, and neither the Commonwealth nor any of its political subdivisions shall create or recognize a legal status identical or substantially equivalent to that of marriage for unmarried individuals.â€
That’s the text. The language of that does not merely prevent judicial activism, it would also prevent the legislature from passing a bill that allowed gays to marry. I am not in favor of judges deciding to impose gay marriage on states, but I believe legislatures should be free to do so. This amendment would tie the legislatures hands, and I will therefore oppose it.
I am a gun rights supporters, but I am not a conservative in most people’s understanding of the term. I support legislative enactment of a civil union provision for gays. I oppose judges imposing this, and would strongly oppose imposing this on churches, but I don’t find the arguments that allowing gays to share the legal benefits of marriage somehow sully the institution.
“That’s the text. The language of that does not merely prevent judicial activism, it would also prevent the legislature from passing a bill that allowed gays to marry.”
Idaho adopted a similar provision a couple of years back. When I went to testify before the legislative committee on this, I specifically suggested that I would prefer simply a statement that the authority to define marriage belonged with the people, or their elected representatives–and that the courts would have no authority to change or overturn the statutory definition.
Of course, if homosexuals had been willing to work within the process of persuasion–instead of using their control over the judiciary to impose their will–this would never have been an issue. And it says quite a bit about the fundamentally totalitarian nature of much of homosexual activism (prohibiting free speech in Canada, and prohibiting opposing viewpoints in schools, as in Harper v. Poway in the 9th Circuit) that they had to use this approach.
One of the reasons that a number of northerners who didn’t care strongly about slavery itself began to join up with the abolitionist movement in the 1830s (people like John Quincy Adams) was that the suppression of freedom of speech and other civil liberties violations at the hands of the slave owners were beginning to scare them.
For the same reason, I find myself increasingly sympathetic to the opponents of homosexuality, because there is so much suppression of civil liberties that seems to be a core part of homosexual activism across the Western world these last few years. The idea of the government requiring churches to marry homosexual couples sounds absurd right now, doesn’t it? Except that this is going on right now in New Jersey, where a church is being sued for refusing to rent out their facilities for a lesbian wedding.
It wasn’t that many years ago that the idea that a print shop owner would be fined for refusing to punish a gay wedding announcement would have been unbelievable. The idea that corporations would fire an employee for refusing to lie and claim that he did approved of homosexuality would have been equally incredible. (AT&T lost the wrongful termination suit, but think of how bizarre this would have seemed in 1970, or even 1980.) We’re on a slippery slope right now; I expect that homosexuals will achieve their goal by repealing the tax-exempt status of any church that refuses to perform gay weddings. (But they’ll find some way to exempt Islamic bodies. Count on it.)